Maximum hard drive size for a Dell SC1430 server

Hi, I'm going to upgrade the hard drives on an older server and want to know what the max size people have had success with. The server currently has 2 - 80GB drives that are not mirrored. The server doesn't appear to have RAID built-in. I called Dell and the tech said that the most it could handle was a SATAII 500GB drive. I'm hoping to go bigger than that. The system currently runs Win 2003 Standard. My plan is to ghost the drives over to the new drives. Thanks in advance.

According to Dell's documentation, that server can support SATA2 drives up to 750GB capacity. If you are looking to expand your storage higher, your best option may be to install an after-market SATA RAID controller. Doing this would eliminate BIOS limitations on hard disks attached to the main system board SATA controller. LSI Logic would be my suggestion for said controller. They tend to have excellent compatibility with all server operating systems.

Dlethe is right in that their docs are never updated, so you might see one that says 500GB (the original specs indicate as the max), then two other docs published at different times indicating that 750GB was the max, then 1TB. The SC1430 has an Intel 5000V chipset ... I believe the practical limit on the size of your hard drive will be 2TB.